November 2012

November 30, 2012

Cultural refinement was the signature attribute of Inder Kumar Gujral, India’s 12th prime minister, who died on Friday at age 92. He would have turned 93 on December 4.

Dapper and scholarly Gujral could be depended upon to break into poetry any moment. He had the voice modulation of a hesitant poet even when he spoke as prime minister. I had many occasions to meet him along with Tarun Basu, the chief editor of the IANS wire, in the 1990s both as foreign minister and prime minister.

Always impeccably turned out either in finely tailored business suits or elegantly stitched Nehru jackets with silk handkerchiefs in his breast pocket, Gujral was an old world figure of grace and charm. One could instantly see why he was a misfit in India’s rough hewn politics but despite that shortcoming he had the tenacity to enjoy long years of great political influence from the 1960s.

It was a combination of that tenacity and the good fortune of being at the right place at the right time that eventually catapulted him to the country’s highest office in April, 1997. Paradoxically, he was an outsider who was also an insider to Indian politics. That explains why he was picked as a compromise candidate for prime minister who lasted barely 11 months in that office.

He followed H D Deve Gowda, another compelling example of how often unlikely and undeserving politicians, rise to the highest level of their calling. Deve Gowda’s term lasted ten months before Gujral was picked. I would not bore you with all the details of the machinations that went behind the scenes, courtesy then then Congress Party president Sitaram Kesri.

It is hard to identify one defining accomplishment of Gujral’s long career but by some consensus it would be what became known as the “Gujral Doctrine” in India’s foreign policy towards its immediate neighbors. He once told Tarun and I that as the biggest geographic presence in South Asia it was India’s “natural obligation” to be twice as accommodating of its neighbors’ idiosyncrasies.

Having been born in what is now Pakistan and having spent his formative years from 1919 to 1947 there, Gujral felt a particular obligation to mend relations with India’s most difficult neighbor. There were many in India who saw his doctrine as excessively conciliatory and even spineless. But Gujral stood his ground insisting that strength came from conciliation and not conflict. Many features of his doctrine remain part of India’s foreign policy towards Pakistan.

A diplomat by inclination and even some actual posting in Moscow (1976-1980) Gujral always saw himself as a composite figure who drew strength from pre-independence India. His forte was foreign policy and he made it a point to pivot his brief prime ministerial tenure around it.

Gujral’s wore his political success and influence rather lightly and never came across as someone who would throw his weight around. His passing closes one more chapter of India’s polity that appears gentle in the tobacco hued tones of nostalgia but was, in fact, as full or rough and tumble as things are now.

November 29, 2012

I do not face the terrible dilemma over which tablet, the computer kind and not the pharmaceutical kind, to buy because I cannot afford either kind.

My blood pressure medicine costs a dollar 20 apiece. Sometimes I think I am better off with high blood pressure because it would hasten and shorten my life. I think I have tried life enough and it is quite overrated.

Back to tablet PCs, there are so many in the market. They are almost as many as the pharmaceutical kind. It is a good thing they do not come with the explicit instruction “Take one tablet by mouth”, although I am sure there are people who might try to “take” a tablet PC through another orifice.

I digress again. Let me get back to tablet PCs. This much is clear—only dinosaurs like me use the desktop. Even laptops are fast becoming so early 21st century. Computer manufacturers have recognized that a significant number of consumers wants something bigger than just a mobile phone and something smaller than a laptop. Tablets seem to fit the bill. There is the Kindle, Nook, Nexus, Galaxy, iPad, iPad Mini and a host of others. What separates these are mostly two overriding features—the slickness of the hardware and the number of apps. The basic technology, like cars, has been mostly perfected.

The difference lies in the trimmings. It could be better reading on some tablets, better videos on others and more apps on some others. For me personally, given that I have to write thousands of words a day (No exaggeration at all) I still dwell in the Stone Age of computing, namely the desktop. I am just too fast as a typist when it comes to touchscreens. My Nook runs and hides under my bed at night because it is afraid I might use the touch keypad to type. The other day I saw it at Walgreens trying to surreptitiously buy prescription pain killers. Mercifully, the pharmacist had the good sense to ask for its configuration.

It is amazing how voice has become incidental to what used to be mere phones but which are now very powerful handheld computing gizmos. When you consider that way more computing power resides in the palm of your hands than it did on some of the lunar missions of the 1970s, you can understand how far we have come.

In a sense we are already in the midst of the early stages of technological singularity. I have argued for sometime now that children born in the last 15 years are or so are, at the very least, a new subspecies. It is as if these days they get born fitted with the ability to use gadgets and devices. Don’t be too surprised if some years from now we will have a human race that will take birth with their palms doubling up as tablet PCs or, better still, humans would be just virtual beings made up of binaries. You can choose your hues but binaries will be common to us all.

For now though we still have to decide between a plethora of tablets. Going by the various nerd reviews there is no single tablet that combines all the useful features. Sometimes I think that is just a racket run by manufacturers as part of a secret agreement among them to keep the market permanently dissatisfied so that they can sell more. So just buy any tablet and regret because regret is the only inerasable truth of our times.

November 28, 2012

Four years before John Keating (a superb Robin Williams) stood on top of his desk in ‘Dead Poets Society’ (1989) to tell his students not to conform and develop a different vantage point on life, there were us, Shireesh Kanekar and I.

On a whim one afternoon in 1985 I told Shireesh, “Why don’t we stand on this desk just for the heck of it?” Shireesh agreed instantly. I, of course, had a history of standing on my desk and chair for no identifiable reason well before this picture was taken by dear friend and terrific photographer Palashranjan Bhaumick.

To balance the sheer oddity of two adults (Shireesh was 42 and I was 24) standing on their desk in their office in the middle of a busy day at work, we had decided that we would make our pose look as purposeful as possible. From what I remember of the conversation prior to this particular shot we decided that while we would make it look as if standing on one’s desk was all in a day’s work for us, we would not make it look as if we were mocking the world. I think the picture does a fairly effective job of capturing that sentiment, thanks to Palash’s outstanding framing. The idea was not to say, “Look we are so cool that we stand on our desk” because we were, in fact, that cool.

There were others in the office of the Gujarat Samachar newspaper on Nagindas Master Road in Fort area of Bombay but I suppose they were used to our ways. We had set up a specialized English news service called Syndicated Press for the newspaper group with the eventual aim of starting a full-fledged wire service but that never happened. In retrospect, one could say that an aspiring wire service where the staffers stood on their desk rather than work at it did not have much future. It folded up in less than two years despite the fact that we had enlisted about 20 leading newspapers as our subscribers. Most of them just would not pay on time, if they paid at all.

If memory serves me right, just as we finished taking the picture and were about to dismount, the owner and editor of the newspaper, Shreyans Shah entered. Accustomed as he was to our quirks, he still looked rather stunned. So much so that he did not say a word then or ever after that.

See below the clip from ‘Dead Poets Society’ where Williams does what we did. When I saw the movie and came upon the scene, my response was, “This is so outdated.”

November 27, 2012

A nearly 90-year-old man, one of India’s most eminent jurists and compelling public contrarians to boot, faces the prospect of being expelled by a political party that often boasts about its traditional values such as respecting elders.

The 89-year-old Ram Jethmalani was a crusty old man before it was fashionable to be crusty and before he was actually old. He has just been served a “show cause notice” by the leadership of his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and could well face expulsion from its ranks. Show cause as in show cause why he should not be expelled for taking a position against the party’s opposition to the appointment of a new director of India’s premier federal investigators Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI).

The dynamic here is complicated because lately Jethmalani has been intractably opposed to the BJP president Nitin Gadkari, who is facing allegations of corruption and land grab. He has maintained that the allegations have “irretrievably and irremediably” damaged the party’s image and Gadkari should step down. To compound his stand, Jethmalani has even complimented Prime Minister Manmohan Singh “for once” doing the right thing in appointing Ranjit Sinha as the CBI director. Taken together Jethmalani’s positions constitute an expulsion-worthy felony in a political party, which like most political parties in India, do not happily suffer dissidence. At worst it is an infraction perhaps deserving of a disapproving look by its president.

There is nothing particularly wrong with what Jethmalani has said in this case. In any case he is at an age where his age is an impregnable shield against censure or punishment for whatever pronouncements he chooses to make. Petulance has always been his default temperament. Having interacted with him frequently in his younger days in Bombay in the 1980s I know that Jethmalani wears few filters. He is the kind of man who always seems on the verge of reprimanding the world. More often than not he does.

I have always found him to be very compelling and very entertaining at once. I once told him that I could picture him as a very cheeky and precocious child. He laughed. India has produced many great jurists but perhaps none who so perpetually harbors peeves and political incorrectness as him. He enhances that personality by being particularly short with the media. In my book that wins the day. “I am not here to satisfy your curiosity” is precisely the kind of line Jethmalani has used many times while dealing with the media.

I have always noticed that Jethmalani’s biggest antagonist is Jethmalani himself. It is as if all his media or public interactions have happened after having very vigorously argued the pros and cons in his mind with himself. The way he presents his case one gets the sense that either there are only pros in whatever position he takes or, at the very least, he could not care less about the cons. Personalities like Jethmalani are essential in a democratic discourse often because they are beneficial for the overall health of a nation’s polity but, at a much superficial level, also because they offer a great deal of entertainment. I mean entertainment in the best possible sense.

There is something unseemly about a political party displaying such fragile self-esteem that it feels compelled to expel a dissenting member. On the scale of anti-party subversiveness what Jethmalani has said does not even remotely meet the standard. In any case the bar for expulsion in any democratic party should be extremely high, if at all it should be there. At its core a political party should be like a popular movement. While some measure of structural discipline is necessary, it cannot be so regimental that its members talk and walk like automatons.

It is amusing that the BJP leadership believes that expelling a nearly 90-year-old man would somehow fortify itself against dissent and make it more complete and cohesive. Apart from the sheer undemocratic nature of their action, even as a strategy it is smarter to have Jethmalani on your side rather than against you. Watching his media interaction here this morning it was reassuring to know that Jethmalani has not lost any of his crustiness. If anything it is even more distilled and sharp.

November 26, 2012

A lot separates an independent journalist—and by independent I mean someone who is no longer formally employed and not necessarily someone who possesses valorous heroism—from finishing books. Mainly, of course, it is the necessity to earn to pay monthly bills that disrupts all plans.

As I draw closer to finishing my book about the testimony in a Chicago court of David Coleman Headley, a key plotter behind the November 26, 2008, Mumbai terrorist attacks, I think it may be appropriate to carry some excerpts from it to mark the fourth anniversary today.

It is also appropriate because it lets readers of this blog know that I do a little more than just write this blog. The book is tentatively titled “The Heterochromic World of David Headley” and it is expected to come out in early 2013.

Here are the excerpts:

May 23, 2011, 9.30 a.m., Chicago

Tahawwur Hussain Rana’s right eyebrow twitched frequently, as did the right end of his mouth, occasionally making a barely audible smacking sound. It was an involuntary action, a nervous tick which probably long predated his arrest in October, 2009 in connection with the Mumbai terror case. He also slouched in his chair as if not wanting to be too conspicuous. That only made him more obvious.

In contrast, his childhood friend David Coleman Headley sat in the witness box with the bearing of someone who was used to surveying everything around him with urgent but passing curiosity. His face was largely inscrutable but had an incomplete smile. When he stood up, as was required when Federal Judge Harry D. Leinenweber and 12 jurors entered the courtroom number 1941, he displayed the confidence of someone who had taken the full measure of his surroundings.

Unlike the rest of the media I had a strong inkling that federal prosecutors would present Headley on day one of the trial. I was told by a highly informed source cryptically, “Be there on the first day” which I took to only mean that the prosecution had decided to unveil its star witness right at the outset and mainly because they did not have much else.

When Headley was brought into the courtroom my first thought was “He looks like an out of work rocker.” It took fellow journalists a few seconds to recognize him. A hand tapped my right shoulder from the bench behind me. One of the reporters whispered in my ear, “Who is that?” “David Headley”, I said.

His heterochromic eyes were unsettling only because it was hard to determine what it was that he was looking at. Or, for that matter, whether they were seeing two different realities and conveying conflicting versions to his brain. Could that be the cause of his twisted worldview?

Sarah Jacob, chief of bureau for America of India’s leading news channel NDTV, asked me if his eyes indeed looked as if they had two different colors. Sitting some 25 feet away from Headley one could not be sure but having seen his photographs one’s mind was already predisposed towards seeing the oddity. From our vantage point it appeared as if he there was an early onset of cataract in his right eye, the lighter one. “A jihadist who needs a cataract procedure?” was what I wondered in my reporter’s notebook.

The proceedings began on a fairly banal note. As the jury entered, the court security officer said, “All rise.” We all did.

The judge, who was already in his seat, looked at Headley for a couple of seconds and then turned to federal prosecutor Daniel J. Collins to ask, “Mr. Collins, are you doing the exam?”

“Yes, sir,” said Collins who looked and felt like a federal prosecutor.

After Headley was sworn in and the judge gave the go ahead, Collins asked, “Can you please state your name?”

“David Headley”

“And how do you spell your last name?” Collins continued.

Headley spelled it slowly.

The judge: Can you folks all hear him?

The jury: Yes

Collins: If you could move the microphone maybe just a little bit closer to you. Mr. Headley, are you currently in custody?

Headley: Yes

Collins: You were arrested on 3rd October 2009; is it correct?”

Headley: Yes

Collins: And you were charged for your role in the terrorist attacks in November 2008 that resulted in about 164 deaths; is that correct?”

Headley: Yes

So began nearly four days of Headley’s testimony which seemed to put more and more distance between him and Rana who had once posted his own house to bail Headley out.

There could not be a greater contrast between the two men, who until recently were the closest of friends. From the descriptions given by his attorneys Charles Swift and Patrick Blegen, Rana seemed to have been the grown-up in their relationship and Headley an oversized and petulant teenager unable to fully grasp the enormity of his misdeeds. (My words, not theirs).

Judge Leinenweber was obviously conscious of the magnitude of the crime that the witness had already pled guilty to but he did a professionally superb job of keeping a neutral expression. Perhaps he did not want prejudice the jury’s mind. In comparison, the 12 jurors seemed unprepared for a complex tour of minds distorted by competing versions of Islamic fanaticism in a distant land that they were about to embark on.

For the Indian journalists in the courtroom Headley was much more than a faceless jihadist as his appetite for a life of flamboyance and glamor had preceded him. He had already been described in the Indian media as a handsome man who under more agreeable circumstances could have made a career as a movie star. However, the man sitting in the witness box did not seem to measure up to that hype, although there were signs why some in the media might have thought so.

There was nothing in his demeanor to suggest nerves or anxiety but rather a player who had rehearsed his role very well. That may have had everything to do with the fact that he had already pled guilty to all 12 counts he was charged with and his presence in the courtroom was primarily to fix the extent of his friend Tahawwur Rana’s complicity.

November 25, 2012

Himanshu Vyas, right, filing his nomination papers for the Gujarat state assembly elections from the Wadhvan constituency (Photo: His Facebook page)

It is now official. My childhood friend Himanshu Vyas has finally filed his nomination papers to contest Gujarat’s upcoming state assembly elections from Wadhvan, constituency number 62 as a candidate of the Congress Party.

For the next two weeks his life will be roses and marigolds, gladhanding and hand waving, speechifying and promising, all this while constantly smiling. Elections are nothing if they are not about exuding perpetual warmth for one’s constituents. Voters do not like surly candidates. Luckily for them, Himanshu is by his very disposition a correct mixture of amiability and authority.

The voting for Himanshu’s constituency along with many others is scheduled for December 13 and the results of all the state elections are expected on December 20. Even after discounting the fact that all campaigns look as if they are headed for a landslide victory, Himanshu stands a fairly good chance of winning this one.

There is something in the way he moves through the constricted lanes of Wadhvan and Surendranagar and surrounding villages that portends an easy victory. Here is what I wrote about him on April 21, 2012: “There is certain body type that exudes authority and power without having either. Himanshu has that body type, particularly in the context of Indian politics. I have frequently joked that Himanshu’s demeanor is such that he always seems to be on the verge of issuing an extraordinary proclamation. It is necessary for anyone in public life to be able to exude that sense of owning the space one is in.” I have seen the followers of Himanshu’s opponents belonging to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) petitioning him for all kinds of help.

Working hours are generally long for any politician but they are particularly punishing during campaigning. The next two weeks will not let Himanshu and those around him sleep more than perhaps two-three hours. The whole choreography of daily life changes dramatically. One has no clue who is carrying and doing what for you.

Your sharply starched churidar-kurta materialize on your bed every morning, your shoes get neatly parked near your bed, your mobile calls get answered by your closest aides, your garlands get plucked from your hands automatically, juice and water bottles rise up to your mouth from different directions and your hair gets combed by someone else’s hands. In short, you are no longer in control of your life. Except sleep and nature’s calls there is almost nothing that you have to do on your own if you are a candidate for a major election in India. Sometimes I suspect that there are aides who might even volunteer to answer nature’s calls on your behalf. So that leaves only sleep.

Knowing Himanshu as well as I do, I know that he will lay out his vision for his constituency in an idiom that his large semi-urban and rural constituents can quickly grasp. While he is capable of great rhetorical flourishes, Himanshu consciously stays away from bombarding his audience with those. His message is always specific and immediately relevant to those he is addressing. It is a performing art that Himanshu has been familiar with since his childhood. I have never seen him pander. He goes to each meeting very well briefed on the constituents’ specific needs and difficulties and makes sure what he promises is delivered.

It is adrenalin time for Himanshu for the next two weeks but I have rarely seen him go off it anyway.

November 24, 2012

Think of India’s electoral democracy as assembly line manufacturing of political parties. While America still debates whether it needs a third party, India has just given birth to its perhaps its 59th party.

The newest entrant will be called ‘Aam Aadmi Party’ (literally Common Man Party but broadly Common Folk Party) mainly floated by India’s most rambunctious, if often self-righteous, anti-corruption campaigner Arvind Kejriwal and his supporters.

As the name suggests, it reflexively excludes nearly half of India’s population of women. While ‘Aadmi’ is used to describe humans generally in Hindi and Urdu it specifically means the male of the species. Its root word is Adam.

According to the Election Commission of India, where all parties have to be registered and earn recognition from, there are 14 national parties, 38 state parties and one group of independents. This was before Kejriwal’s new party. Additionally, there are four other parties already awaiting their recognition as well. It seems to me that it might be easier for the commission to recognize every Indian as a political party because every Indian, in fact, is a political party. They can use their own face as their symbol.

There are those who think that the glow of political selflessness around Kejriwal would dim considerably with the formation of a new party. That makes him just another politician and like all new politicians he too is like a new broom that promises to sweep cleaner than the rest. A couple of years down the line, when the bristles begin to wear off and get entangled, his supporters would realize that the broom does leave behind lines of dirt in the middle.

So far Kejriwal has been using a lot of the terminology used by a certain Mohandas K. Gandhi such as “swaraj” (self-rule) and “poorna azadi” (total freedom). The austere air that he wears around himself is also similar to Gandhi. He has been hyper-communicative in the mode of Gandhi. But those are superficial similarities because India has not seen the mover of mass public opinion with the effectiveness, scale, political inventiveness and loftiness of Gandhi’s magnitude since his passing. It might help people to remember that Gandhi came way before the communications revolution.

In a sense, it is a good thing that Kejriwal and his supporters’ so far undefined angst will now be tested at the hustings in very specific terms. He will find out whether what he stands for and articulates can translate into actual votes and seats in village councils, municipalities, state legislative assemblies and national parliament. As the famous political pundit Mayank Chhaya is about to say, “It is nuts and bolts time, baby.” It is no longer about frenzied posturing and sanctimonious hectoring for Kejriwal and his team.

It is ironic that the system that Kejriwal and his team would rather dismantle totally and discard has, in fact, co-opted them. Once you are a political party all the rules enforced by the country’s autonomous Election Commission would apply to Aam Aadmi Party or, as non-English TV news anchors are likely to call it, Aa Aa Pa. He is smart enough to know that political parties always need hard cash and hard cash always comes with hard strings and hard strings always make political maneuverability much harder.

As someone who watches changing socio-political trends for a living, it would be interesting to see how and whether Kejriwal and his party remain uncontaminated by all the skullduggery and chicanery that realpolitik really is.

November 23, 2012

A part of Mars rover Curiosity’s Sample Analysis at Mars’ (SAM) instrument where Martian soil samples are deposited. (Image: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov)

So far it appears that there is no life on Mars, at least not life as I understand where a bunch of angry young Martians would pelt NASA’s rover Curiosity with rocks.

Of course, rocks are involved in Curiosity’s mission but that is entirely out of choice because that’s what it is supposed to sample and analyze. Among the many tasks that Curiosity is equipped to carry out perhaps none is more important than what the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) is designed to do. On November 13, NASA said, “A pinch of fine sand and dust became the first solid Martian sample deposited into the biggest instrument on NASA's Mars rover Curiosity: the Sample Analysis at Mars, or SAM.”

So far it all sounded rather routine and space missionspeak. Then came something a much more compelling and specific when Joe Palca of the National Public Radio was told by the mission’s principal investigator John Grotzinger, "We're getting data from SAM as we sit here and speak, and the data looks really interesting…This data is gonna be one for the history books. It's looking really good.”

Even if you account for the fact that the weight of the mission’s $2.5 billion dollar price tag is hard to bear, scientists are not naturally given to grand claims unless they are on to something. So Grotzinger’s assertion that the data is going to be for the “history books” has set the nerd community and apprentice nerds like me abuzz. Could it be that Curiosity has found something of great consequence and, if so, what?

As I said it could not be angry young Martians pelting rocks because that would have proved conclusively that life has indeed evolved there along the lines of what we see here on Earth. Speculations are that it could be some form of fossil or microbial life. But as the Guardian’s Stuart Clark writes Grotzinger had earlier said this: "Curiosity is not a life detection mission. We're not actually looking for life; we don't have the ability to detect life if it was there."

It is not altogether inconceivable that NASA may be deliberately underplaying the mission’s ability to actually detect life to keep the knowledge of its discovery a closely guarded secret. But then that is entering the realm of conspiracy theory. So let’s just take their word for it and accept that detecting life is not its mission. We do know that its mission is certainly to establish if Mars can/did/does support life.

Expectations are that in the next few weeks NASA will announce what that data “for the history books” actually is. Unless it approximately supports possibilities of life I don’t think ordinary people would particularly care. We live on a planet where life literally drops from the air, as in languid bees that started dropping on my desk the other day from the ceiling of my basement. They have gone now but our planet is bursting with life wherever you look.

At this stage I am more looking forward to being told that there can never be life on Mars because the planet itself is one giant life form or that it is a giant optical illusion. The news of life on Mars has been in the air for so long it has perished now.

November 22, 2012

President Barack Obama, second from left, pardoning one of the two randomly chosen turkeys. On the right are his daughters Sasha and Malia. (Photo: Video grab from official White House video)

This Thanksgiving Day, I have decided to profusely thank myself. After all, who does more for me?

Also since I am a vegetarian, I have decided to pardon two randomly chosen potatoes from being skinned and boiled.

The sheer burden of waking up every morning around 4.30 a.m. and discovering it is still me I am waking up with can only be felt and not described. “You? Oh, not again,” is what I say. I think I ought to thank myself. So thank you for putting up with me.

This holiday is an acquired taste like all holidays, I suppose. I have never hosted a Thanksgiving dinner because it does not come naturally to me. I do get invited to a very elaborate one every year where more than 100 guests are invited. At every such gathering I think about how ritualized and routinized our lives are. We get together, shake hands, drink, talk about this, that and the other, eat, talk some more and then go home only to wake up next morning.

A very dead and very cooked turkey is sliced and eaten by people as if they are eating it for the first time. You can recycle comments/compliments from last year about how good the turkey is and no one would notice. How many different ways can one come up with to compliment a sliced turkey?

Being somewhat twisted, I always speculate in my mind about what a particular turkey may have been doing before being slaughtered, skinned and served. Considering the large industrial scale of poultry farming in America, it probably came from a huge farm where it was raised only to be eaten. It probably enjoyed no recreational time. For me it is always about a single individual bird and what was going on in its life before it was swept up by the monstrous human eating machine.

Speaking of single birds, some of you may have heard of this ridiculous ritual at the White House where the incumbent president “pardons” two randomly chosen turkeys and spares them the cruel fate of being killed and eaten like some 50 million others on this day. This year President Barack Obama pardoned two named Cobbler and Gobbler. Without a trace of irony the president said, “Congratulations, Cobbler. You have a great life.” For every Cobbler and Gobbler that get ceremoniously pardoned and stroked by the leader of the free world, tens of millions of others might be thinking, “What about us?”

I am no bleeding heart animal rights activist because I think our entire human food chain is inherently cruel and lives off other life forms. I personally see no difference between slicing a tomato and slicing a turkey. So I take no moral high ground here. If I could eat and digest rocks, I probably would but then there could well be microbial life in those as well. So it seems to me there is no escape from eating other life forms. Vegetarians merely pretend that theirs is a kinder choice when in reality there is no difference when you get right down to it.

I wonder whether others think of such useless things and then write about them.

November 21, 2012

My rather laughable rendering of Mumbai news photographer Sebastian D’Souza’s iconic picture of Ajmal Kasab. I don’t have the original picture’s publishing rights. You can see it here

Five days shy of the fourth anniversary of the November 26, 2008, Mumbai terror attack, Ajmal Kasab, the last of its 10 dramatis personae has been hanged by India in a craftily timed decision.

I say craftily because of 1) The approaching anniversary of the Mumbai attack, 2) The start of Indian parliament’s winter session on November 22, 3) The approaching state legislative elections in Gujarat next month 4) The easy obviousness of the decision.

Of course, no one from the Indian government can be rationally expected to concede any or all of the above points. That is just my way of looking at a development that could have taken place any time after the 25-year-old lone surviving Pakistani gunman was sentenced to death.

The decision to carry out Kasab’s hanging and burial in the Yerawada Jail in Pune was kept a very tightly held secret. So much so that the hangman was not told around whose neck he was tasked to tighten the noose. Kasab was told of his impending hanging on November 12 in Mumbai’s Arthur Road Central Jail and was flown to Pune on November 19.

It is amazing how a society that is one gigantic sieve otherwise is also so good at keeping secrets.

Since the Mumbai killings in which 166 people died I have written several posts about Kasab. I would like to reproduce some of the more compelling ones here.

April 29, 2009

Mohammed Ajmal Amir Kasab, the lone surviving gunman of last year’s Mumbai terror strikes, wants toothpaste, “perfumes” and an Urdu newspaper as he awaits his trial. I understand the toothpaste and newspaper part but “perfumes” mystifies me. Body odor is the least of Kasab’s problems, I think.

Kasab is lodged in the Arthur Road Central Jail in Mumbai, a place I am familiar with from my younger days while reporting on the city’s underworld. One needs more than perfumes to get by in a jail cell there cooked by the city’s oppressively humid climate. Someone might have forgotten to inform the young man that he is in there to answer charges running into thousands of pages and not on a business trip to Mumbai from Karachi in a hotel where the room service staff forgot to stock up his toiletries.

There is something amusing about Kasab’s request for perfumes because he obviously thinks it will be taken seriously. I think his request should be seen in the context of another request to be allowed a walk in the prison’s courtyard. When he does so, he is likely to sweat causing an unpleasant body odor for the fellow prisoners. It is out of this humanitarian concern that he wants what he wants. Or perhaps he is motivated by the likelihood that he may end spending the rest of his life there. So he might as well make it comfortable.

May 6, 2010

Hours after he was captured Mohammad Ajmal Amir Kasab, the sole surviving gunman of the 2008 Mumbai terror strikes, was asked by a police officer what else had been planned after the attacks. Laying in his hospital bed, Kasab responded, “Marne wale the. (Were going to die).”

An unexpressed sentiment behind his tone would have been: “Yeh bhi koi poochhne ki bat hai? (Should you even ask that question?)” All the ten gunmen were obviously primed to die by their trainers but were also instructed to cause maximum death and chaos before that.

As Special Judge M K Tahilyani inevitably sentenced Kasab to death in Mumbai, it was ironic that the young Pakistani got what he had come prepared for. The sentence has set off a debate in India whether the death penalty is effective deterrence against such terrorists. It is tempting to say that those who are so desperate to die to prove a point can be best punished by keeping them alive but incarcerated for life. Life in a South Asian prison is so shorn of dignity that it destroys the inmates from their core. For someone like Kasab, who was sold a fantastic afterlife, there could not be anything more unsettling than staying alive and experiencing the hard labor of an Indian prison.

When and if Kasab is hanged it will be at a time and place chosen by the state. For a fidayeen, or an Islamist guerilla ready to sacrifice their lives, this is an important distinction. It is not the death that they fear as long as it is under the circumstances controlled by them. It is the death that is handed down by the entity they see as their ultimate enemy which they cannot come to terms with. The realization that he are no longer in control of his life or death is traumatic to reconcile with for someone with Kasab’s mindset.

There is another significant aspect to this debate. When a fidayeen is in the throes of his act, propelled by a powerful mixture of adrenalin and the certitude and righteousness of his cause, death seems inviting. They see glory in it which to a rational mind is totally fake. However, when the effects of that deadly cocktail of adrenalin, certitude and righteousness wears off—and it invariably does within hours—then death seems way more disturbing and debilitating. When they hear the judge say "To be hanged by the neck till death", the sheer oppressive banality of the impending doom strikes them. Many of them then feel paralyzed.

That is when Kasab would find his own words “Marne wale the” profoundly troubling.

While there was no official response from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the US Attorney's office or Headley's lawyer John Theis, background conversations with authorities prompted nothing more than amused disbelief.

Although it is obvious that US prosecutors and investigators are following the media frenzy in India over Kasab recanting his confession and claiming that Headley was among the FBI team that questioned him, they are unlikely to make any official comment on the subject.

It is baffling for the authorities here how Kasab, the lone surviving gunman of the Mumbai terror attacks who is incarcerated in maximum security prison, would have known about Headley by name. Equally intriguing is what persuaded him to surmise that introducing Headley's name at this stage of the case would create a great deal of confusion. But this development has no immediate bearing on Headley's impending trial in Chicago, or that of his fellow accused, Tahawwur Hussain Rana's.

Sources familiar with such matters say that as a matter of policy the FBI or any similar US government agency does not officially offer comment such subjects. Some non-US sources speaking to IANS on background, said although it is not as absurd as it may sound that someone like Headley could have been included in an official team under a plausible guise, in this particular case it is almost certain that it did not happen.

"Apart from the grave violation of another country's immigration laws, such an act has the real potential of causing profound damage to bilateral diplomatic ties. So unless it happened with Washington and New Delhi's covert consent, there is no way the FBI on its own would have taken Headley with them," these sources said.

An official at the Chicago FBI office's public affairs department declined to comment and instead asked that a formal email be sent to seek information. IANS did send that request but received no response.

Headley is under detention pending his trial on 12 counts, including six counts for aiding and abetting the murder of US citizens in India and another six counts of "conspiracy to bomb public places in India, to murder and main persons in India and Denmark."

By the time the Mumbai attacks happened Headley was already in the FBI's crosshairs and it is highly unlikely that the subject of a sensitive global investigation would have been co-opted into the questioning of another accused, namely Kasab.

Considering that the FBI team visited Mumbai only in recent weeks and also that Headley has been in detention since Oct 3, there is next to nothing prospect of him having been taken to Mumbai even as part of a larger investigation to determine whether he had any personal contact with Kasab.

In the absence of a smoking gun to bear out Kasab's sensational claim, there is almost no possibility of verifying it. On the face of it Kasab's claim seems like nothing more than an attempt to throw a monkey wrench at the Indian justice system. If any of what he is claiming is even partly true, then it does bring into question the credibility of the whole case. That may well be his intention since he has nothing to lose if he had indeed set out of Pakistan with the knowledge that his action could result in his own death.